Tagged: glazes

New leap forward

It’s a new Year if you did`nt already  know. This is the time when you are forced to make some fast and hard decisions, as for one thing it gets boring listening to yourself making the same excuses. So what are my plans for the new year? Quite a few as it happens as I will soon get my kiln, which will enable me to glaze and fire my pots. This might sound like, do bears shit in the woods! But yes and no, yes they do and no in that I will now have to start thinking about more throwing, which means more shapes and a bigger learning curve in mixing glazes and firing a kiln to capacity. Also  I have been told that my work will be part of a pop up shop in York in 2015. So me and the bears have some **** to get together.

Wardlow Mires pottery and food Festival

I recently went to the Wardlow Mires pottery and Food Festival, in Derbyshire. This is a real must for your diary for next year! Get on the mailing list. There are around fifty potters exhibiting their wares. I will up date my links to some of these potters as they are well worth a visit online. As my site says, I am a newbie potter and as such I found lots of inspiration and sound advice from the potters at the show. Mike Dodd  is a potter with lots of advice .Another potter that caught my attention was Ruthanne Tudball a soda glazed ceramics artist, you can find her work at . But what have done as far as my own pottery. Well I am still doing my jugs and getting pleased with my forms. My handles have taken a bit of a step back, but over all I am happy with the way things are going.

20131017-120337.jpg . As certain things come in to play like getting my centring and form more true. I then started some time back thinking of how I was was going to cook my pots. I looked at lots of kilns on eBay and gumtree and found then either over priced or too far away. So I have decided to build my own, with the help of joe finch kilns.

Jugs big and small

Have started throwing bigger jugs of recent using two pounds of clay. It has taken a bit of time to adjust to the new weight of clay as far as centring and shaping is concern. To be honest a lot of my trouble is concentrating on what I am doing, and sticking to it!! I am all over the place at the moment trying to put ever thing I have learnt into practice on the wheel. I forget little simple things like sticking to how far I pull the clay out after centring. This is not such a bad thing as I have found myself ending up creating a pot I would never of never set out to form. In going with the flow of the clay has resulted in a possible vase taking shape or maybe even a honey jar. I suppose its in my nature to-day dream, have a play and not be too serious. please if you read this post, please leave a comment as its great to get some feed back.

a bigger pot

a bigger pot

pots of all shapes and sizes

pots of all shapes and sizes

Its been a good day.

potter road

Its been a good day. I have started to make some progress with the throwing after such a long time off the wheel. Practice, practice is not all you need to bring to the wheel to complete a pot. Focus, focus and more focus. Getting back that feel of the clay in the fingers has been a good feeling today. Chasing up that ripple of clay from the bottom of the pot to the very top, like a mighty wave ebbing  on to the shore.” Feel the clay” a potter once told me! How true this is, you need to feel and go with the clay and stay focused on the task  at hand. So I am happy in the fact that I have started to get the feel for the clay back and started to make a few items to put up on my shelf.